If you want security start the required daemon. In our case, we will use wpa_supplicant. If one want something else one can attempt to use it, but again, I did not do any such tests apart from using wpa_supplicant.To use wpa_supplicant we need to create a .conf file which will hold the essid and password for our hotspot. The required contents as as follows:

Ed, this is an important topic. We have seen so many posters struggle with Network-Manager or Wicd on a desktop that doesn't move, thus uses one connection only. A few lines of script can fix such a connection permanently. Even portable machines do not need Network-Manager or Wicd. The real difficulty for so many is not understanding those simple scripts that actually make the connections and fall back on GUI's thinking they have to.